SWL Week in Review - Tiktok, Trade Wars, and Financial Nihilism
More or Less The meme-economy, Stargate, & God Bless Lauren Sanchez… look - everything else aside, the next four years are going to be SUPER entertaining…
Some Other Hot Takes:
- Operator ‘launch’ for years in the early 2010s Aaron, Dave, Justin and I would run around yelling ‘operator’ and asking for stuff to happen in the real world (remember the Matrix) — now OpenAI took the branding and ran with it… I am still very skeptical however that we are even close to this working IRL — I don’t think the pure technologists really understand the economics of the AI assistant problem.
- Memes rule everything around me — I think we need to really re-evaluate the bigger picture of how we think about ‘value’ in polite society…. As incentives of retail investors shift with inequality & the way communities build shifts, so too will how we think about storing value and supply and demand for narratives — net present value and DCF models might still be the broadest / most universal form of value, but as AI makes everything binary — worth zero or infinity — the relative value of stable ‘ok’ businesses shifts a lot.
- The 2025 founder archetype — the nerdzoids got really mad about this one…. But look, if AI is clearly making software development a commodity, then software development is no longer a very powerful weapon in the world… and value will go to specialists and those with trust / community vs. the software know-nothing kiddies who can code and have the energy to stay up all night.
- “I find you obnoxious“ is one of the funniest openers asking for a meeting I have ever gotten. Thank you internet for your infinite entertainment…
- The rise of AI digital characters as the new 24/7 news anchors backed by crypto owners — not getting enough attention.
- The Trump Whirling Dervish Social Media PR Strategy Applied to EOs — the man understands modern media strategy for sure — say everything, which basically distracts the mass media from having the attention to dwell on ANYTHING… .and the specialists in each area celebrate their personal EO.
Sam
🚨 Tasti — Software Experiment Alert — Sometimes what is old needs to be new again … so you might want to try the earliest version of tasti if you have fond memories of the original Web 2.0 company.. del.icio.us
Social bookmarking rebuilt for the AI age.
The vision is simple — I don’t trust AI for recs and suggestions when they are looking at and mimicking the ‘mid’ opinions of the whole internet… I want a socially curated set of sources as the base for AI enhancement :)
Tasti is still rough on the edges, but in production if you want to grab the chrome extension you can signup and join my group curating high-quality adult media…. And/or make your own link sharing groups :)
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop | to get added to the mailing list email sl@wlessin.com
Similar newsletters
There are other similar shared emails that you might be interested in: